Web Project

I printed some flyers for my web project. It was a lot cheaper than I thought they would be and they turned out really well. I already handed out some of them and the response was really good so far. I will probably continue doing marketing using flyers for now until I actually include marketing mechanics into the product itself.

My partner and I don’t meet that often in person because we have pretty clearly defined roles. He also recently moved and going to the office here takes a long time for him. Just having a meeting via Skype is normally enough for us anyway. The problem is just that setting Skype appointments seem so much more difficult than having meetings in person. We try to be spontaneous with it but in those cases one of us never has the time to do it. Setting an appointment beforehand works better but a lot still hinders us in those cases. There is a simple solution to the problem, though: We just have to take these meetings more serious.

It is so much more difficult working for my own projects. When I work for something else, I can really clearly see what needs to be done. I am the consumer and I know what interests me and what I want to see. When I create something for my own projects, though, the perspective is different. I am the producer and I want to show somebody else all of the different facets. I try to show them everything I see in the project and that can be difficult. I want to create something perfect and that is just impossible.

Christmas is over. I didn’t really work at all during this time. I got a little bit of stuff done but overall I just took it really easy. I know that it will be difficult waking up properly again tomorrow and doing work. I will want to continue relaxing but I definitely cannot do it. My company is not going to wait for me.

Content is king and I notice that the best thing I can do for my dancer app is upload more content regularly. It is not difficult getting the content and I can do it pretty quickly as well. The problem is doing it regularly. Taking an hour every day is really difficult. I should do it, though. It doesn’t feel like progress but this stuff is so important. It is basically maintenance.

We were presenting our company at a trade show recently. It was a nice experience and a lot of people were really interested in the product. There were even some people who seemed ready to buy right there on the spot. We decided to only collect email addresses though and sell later. This might have been a mistake. We are trying to catch up but most people are just not as interested anymore.

Open Source Libraries are so amazing. They are really god-sent. I am able to create something really difficult and complicated in a matter of days because all of the hard work has already been done by other people who make their work available for free for everybody to use. I need to make sure to donate to these projects as soon as I make some more money.

I finally finished the animation video I posted about before. I had to use a royalty free song and make my own sound effects. It is actually pretty funny. I guess if you watch the video from a professional standpoint, there are a ton of things that are not that great. However, I hope that people will get that it is a little bit tongue in cheek. The video is not meant to be serious and I never claim that I am a great animator. I just hope that people will be able to laugh about the parts that are not great.

I am working on an animation video for Choomza right now. It is supposed to draw in more people and get them excited. I want to create a nice looking animation video that shows some of the stuff you can do on the site. This means that I need to animate a whole video. Technically, I am able to do it but my artistic ability is not enough to actually make it look good.

I have been drawing some of the characters and you can clearly see what I mean but they look more like scribbles than professional animations. People might be able to forgive that. If they know me, they probably don’t expect all of the drawings to be perfect. The point of the video is probably more important than how artistic it is. However, I want to use this to advertise Choomza and the video will hopefully be seen by lots of people who don’t actually know me and those might be a lot more critical of the drawing style. In the end, I have no choice though. I cannot do it better than I can do it and I cannot afford to hire somebody who can.

There are two views of what needs to be done for Choomza. I might think that the system should sell itself and the failure to keep people from coming back and recommending the system to their friends is a failure of my programming. I still have a lot of ideas to improve Choomza and to make it more viral. If this view is true, I should probably focus all of my time on developing more on it.

The other view is that the system is already really good but I need to change user behavior and that takes a lot of effort and time. In this case, I should not develop more on Choomza but spend more time selling it. I still have a lot of ideas of things I can do for my marketing.

However, the truth is probably that I need to do a mix of both things. I need to remind people more about Choomza and effectively communicate with them. However I should also improve Choomza so that when they visit the page, they are more inclined to stick around and recommend it to their friends. It is just that it is really hard to find the right balance between the two.